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Bengaluru Artist Residency One

Bengaluru Artist Residency One (BAR1) is a non-profit artist exchange programme set up and run by a collective of visual artists from Bangalore. The main objective of this programme has been to foster local, Indian and international exchange of ideas and experiences through guest residencies. This grant enables BAR1 to host a three-month India-India residency programme for emerging Indian artists from an extended field of arts practice in order to nurture individual artistic practice through collective exchange.

Beginning on July 1, 2008, the BAR1 residency will host six Indian artists from across the country concerned with pursuing form-based experiments that extend the boundaries of their practice and that of the field. Artists will be chosen from diverse cultural backgrounds and regions in India, to facilitate greater interaction and exchange. They will be encouraged to explore and draw upon Bangalore city and its different institutions. The residency programme has been imagined as a playful laboratory. It will include salons that offer the resident artists regular critique and feedback, and a closing public event, or finissage, where they can share their works in progress.

However important the interdisciplinary impetus for collaboration and cultural exchange may be, the collective feels that the artists should have the freedom to develop their work at their own pace, and interpret the residency from their own perspective. BAR1 believes that a theme, if any, should come from the participants themselves. The residency, therefore, will evolve, take its own shape, and be as flexible as the residents want it to be. To that effect, BAR1 will curate a group that will inspire a diverse and constructive exchange of ideas without any pressure to exhibit or produce finished work at the end of the residency. The regular salons will be documented with the intent of publishing, at a later stage, interesting dialogues between the residents, cultural practitioners and other artists.